What Ho, World!

What Ho World! is a light role-playing game of hijinks and shenanigans set in the breezy upper classes of the roaring 20s. With the improvised storytelling of a roleplaying game and the pick-up-and-play nature of a card game, you can jump right into things and tell a great story together over the space of a few hours.

The deck includes 5 characters: the flighty Gadabout, the dependable Servant, the conniving Aged Relative, the imperious Pillar of Society, and the eccentric Highbrow. Players each pick a character and customise them by choosing ability cards, relationships with the other characters, and cosmetic details (name, appearance, personality etc). Then the group drafts Goals and Assets for each character - these are the objectives they're trying to achieve, and the resources they have to try to do that.

Play then starts, with each player taking it in turn to play through a short scene of their character working towards their goal while the other characters help, interfere, or push their own agendas. Within scenes, characters can activate special abilities to do things like revealing an incredibly expensive possession, providing another character with a refreshing cocktail, or fixing someone with an imperious gaze that forces them to reveal their secrets. These are all paid for with a limited pool of tokens, meaning players must carefully plan when they use their abilities to guide the story in their preferred direction.

As characters make progress on their goals they accumulate special tokens they can cash in for an all-or-nothing attempt to complete the goal. Once someone has completed all their goals, the game wraps up with an epilogue showing how things worked out for each character.

User Note: this game also has an RPG item entry: What Ho, World!